Feature request: IPC classes

[AVermeij]

I have a request which might benefit inventor network analyses on the industry/technology level. The current datasets (as in, the ones on the Harvard Patent Dataverse) include US patent classifications (e.g. 567/123), but do not include International Patent Classifications (IPC, e.g. H01L 31/00). During some of my analyses, I've noticed that making subselections of specific industry or technology data using IPC classes often allows for better results. This is because (at least to me) IPC seems more specific in its variety of technology codes, and has an overall clearer build-up of its scheme (e.g. H01L for all semiconductor devices; H01L 31 for semiconductors sensitive to light and radiation; and further breakdowns for more specific technology varieties).

Would it be possible to also extract the IPC classes from the USPTO patent data and add this to the datasets as an extra column? Or, even better, as multiple columns for (1) the main class, (2) the sub-class and (3) the sub-sub-class.

Thanks!

[doolin]

This seems like a reasonable request, won't make any promises until we dig into implementation a bit deeper.